Catacombs and Castles Review

boardgamequest.com:

We received Catacombs and Castles, a dexterity game published by Elzra Games. Catacombs and Castles is a combination dexterity and skirmish game set in a fantasy setting.

I like a lot of skirmish games. There’s something about controlling the battlefield, triggering special abilities, and capturing objectives. Dexterity games also intrigue me as you replace dice or card luck with your own fine motor skills. But what happens when you mix them together?

You get Catacombs and Castles by Elzra Games which plays 2-8 players in 30-60 minutes.

For team mode, teams are set up as teams of two, three, or four characters depending on player count and whether you want a shorter or longer game.

Each player selects their heroes and takes their hero piece, portrait card, and rules card making sure to select the streamlined A-side or more complicated B-side as the rest of the players. Each hero also takes a team action card. The objective of the game is to take all 12 health tokens from the other team.

The game is played in rounds which has the teams taking alternating turns. A player’s turn play follows their individual rule card which is often made up of one or more flicks of tokens. A rush is a movement that won’t deal damage if your hero piece hits an opponent. A melee attack has the player flicking their hero piece while a ranged attack has players using a different token placed within 1 inch (or 25 mm for fans of the metric system). These ranged tokens will often have different effects. Some characters act in a specific order where a carrot (>) symbol is between icons (for example Rush then attack) while the pipe (|) symbol represents an or between actions.

Hitting one opponent into another doesn’t chain damage but a hero can carom between enemies dealing damage to multiple opponents. Luckily for bad players, like me, there’s no friendly fire damage. When damage is done, tokens are used to charge up team abilities. There’s also armor tokens which absorb damage and different